News

EG is back!

Tue 20th Mar 2018 - 1:56pm

For the first time in a year, EG claimed its first trophy along with some very precious DPC points at the GESC Indonesia Dota2 Minor. The tournament was interesting to watch as lower tier teams battled hard throughout the whole competition. The Dota Pro Circuit is not waiting for you though, it just finished a tournament in China and then we already find ourselves back in Europe for another minor: DreamLeague Season 9. All the freshest and most important news from the Dota Pro Circuit, as always handed over to you on a silver platter!

This Minor was the most open tournament of the season, as none of the teams participating had won a competition so far this year. EG and VGJ.Thunder went into the tournament as favorites with the objective of bringing back home some precious DPC points. Other teams such as Fnatic, NaVi and Infamous knew they would have to battle hard in order to be in the running for a few of these points.

During the group stages, the favorite teams confirmed their superiority, while Infamous bested NaVi to claim second place in group A. In Group B, VGJ.Thunder and Fnatic took the two first places, whereas the newly reformed team Digital Chaos failed to win a single game.

In the playoffs, the new Swedish squad ‘The Final Tribe’ eliminated the local team Rex Regum Qeon in a disputed Bo1, however their run stopped in the quarterfinals when losing 2-1 against Infamous. The other quarterfinals was one of the most epic series played so far this year, which was played between NaVi and Fnatic. It was the battle of the two most famous esports brands, and trust me, it was intense. The first game went in favor of Fnatic after an 80 minute game full of fights and turnarounds, which are already pretty rare at this level of Dota. NaVi dominated the second game and won in about 45 minutes, but the third game was by far the most spectacular one. Fnatic was doing it, they had a huge gold and experience lead, 35k gold when hitting the 60 minute mark. It only took one greatly executed teamfight however for NaVi to turn everything around. After holding their base with the Ancient exposed for fifteen minutes, they managed to do the impossible: NaVi went straight to the opponent's base and with the help of a rapier on Lina, they took down the Ancient in the blink of an eye. Epic.

Unfortunately, NaVi’s miraculous run ended in the semifinals against EG, where they clearly did not have enough to bother the US squad. In the other semis, Infamous surprised VGJ.Thunder in the first game but could not claim one more win that they needed to reach the Grand Finals. In this last game of the tournament, EG confirmed their dominance by winning their two games together in about 45 minutes. EG did not lose a single game in Jakarta and finally won their first trophy of the season, a big relief for a team that had not won a tournament since May 2017. Their last major tournament victory being… TI5.

This first world Dota2 championships started back in November 2017 and ended this weekend after a week long marathon of games in Haikou, China. The prize pool for this competition was huge: 1,5 million dollars to win nicely spread among the top 16 teams. It was therefore no surprise that there were big names participating in WESG, such as the Russian team which was basically Virtus.Pro2.0. The final stage of the tournament was massive, and so this summary will be way shorter than the overall results. Some teams were expected to perform well but did not confirm their status such as Team NL (with former pro and YouTube star SingSing and SexyBamboe), Team Sweden which was basically Alliance, and Team Romania that had players such as canceL^^ and w33. Other teams did surprisingly well, notably Team Finland, NiceOne that was representing Kazakhstan, and the Malaysian team Fire Dragoon. Among the top performing teams, we could find most of the professional teams: Pain Gaming, SG Esports, Team Russia (VP) or Rock.Y. Team Hellas from Greece also had an amazing run by reaching the third place of the tournament and a well deserved 150,000$. In the Grand Finals of the competition, Pain Gaming faced the russians from Virtus.Pro and lost 2-1 in an interesting series. The Brazilian squads brought home 300,000$, which is way more than they would ever earn in the Dota Pro Circuit, while Russia won the 800,000$ prize for the first place.

Qualifier results

The EU qualifiers for MDL Changsha started this week and OG bested their opponents to qualify for the Chinese major that will take place between the 14th and 20th May 2018. In the final series, OG won their Bo5 3-0 against a team formed by syndereN and KheZu called “Mad Lad”. Even though this amateur team had a convincing qualifier, they could not match the level shown by OG.

All the other qualifiers will take place next week, except for in the SEA region which will be played somewhere in mid-April.

The Dota Pro Circuit does not stop, and for the next three weeks it will stay just as intense as it already is. We are now flying to Stockholm to compete in another minor tournament that will start on Wednesday 21st of March and end on Sunday the 25th. Last week’s teams were all tier two teams, but for this upcoming tournament we will enjoy watching some of the very best teams in the circuit, namely: Liquid, Secret, OG, Newbee, Empire, Fnatic, Immortals and Pain Gaming.

At Ocean esports our purpose is to help gamers improve and meet people. We want to build a platform for skill development, challenge the perception of gamers and creat e global, safe, E-sports community by attracting people who want to grow and take pride in our community. To achieve this we organize tournaments, inclusive events, organize scrimmages, workshops, and provide game-related content via our media channels. All of us are passionate about competition, hailing from sports… Read More